1939: Hinges of History

Clare Boothe Luce was one of the most famous women of 20^th century America. Playwright (The Women), columnist, and political provocateur, she was married to Henry Luce, the biggest publisher and media baron of the Thirties and Forties. Try to picture a one-woman combination of Ann Coulter and Tulsi Gabbard, then imagine if that woman was married to Rupert Murdoch. The lady, in short, had clout, and was never shy about using it. She was many things in her long life; a Republican congresswoman, later an ambassador. Tart-tongued and always quotable, she said things like, “Remember, whenever a Republican leaves one side of the aisle and goes to the other, it raises the intelligence quotient of both parties”.

But no other remark had the public impact of her criticism of FDR, who was then widely revered: “He lied us into war, because he lacked the political courage to lead us into it”.

“He lied us into war”? Right on the surface of it, wasn’t that obviously unfair? Weren’t we dragged into it by America’s enemies? We sure didn’t ask for Pearl Harbor. Four days later Hitler declared war on us, not the other way around. Those are facts. But the surface truths may or may not be the whole story. There are a lot of cases of history that, after careful examination, are basically not far from we already understood, but when looked at in close up and slow motion have ambiguous, even contradictory lessons that are significant enough to add useful shades of grey to an otherwise clear black and white picture.

Pat Buchanan caused plenty of controversy from the moment he chose a title for his 2008 book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. Whatever else we can say about Buchanan, he is famously a Nixon man; not a moralist but a cynical, cold-eyed judge of American interests as he sees them. To reduce a thick book to one controversial idea, he suggests that to a greater degree than we were taught, for America, World War II was a war of choice. Discussing that idea should not be off limits.

On the fringes, there were always a couple of 12/7 Truthers, though they are largely forgotten now. Unlike the 9/11 cultists, nobody claimed that President Roosevelt was in on it, and few of them claimed he knew what was going to happen. The postwar reckoning for Pearl Harbor focused on communications and command screw-ups specific to the event, not to the wider question of the wisdom or outcome of prewar policies meant to punish or deter Germany, Italy and Japan.

In retrospect, were boycotts, tariffs, sanctions, and finally armed prewar conflicts on the open seas needlessly provocative, further inflaming a tense international situation? Or, as most of us accepted, were they rough but effective improvised responses to a dangerous new wave of Axis warfare?

There’s an alternate and opposing, mostly Left view to all of this, and you see it in films like The Darkest Hour: Far from being a crafty warmonger scheming to help England, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in this view, was a well-meaning but weak-willed ditherer who knew that Churchill needed his immediate help to save the world, but was constrained by being head of a nation too shallow and spoiled to stir itself in time to do anything. From this point of view, everything America did was too little, too grudging, and too late.

As it happens, you can listen to President Roosevelt’s voice and intonation, and use your intuition to help decide for yourself how sincere he was about moving America into a prewar posture.

CBS’s Washington, DC affiliate WJSV recorded one entire broadcast day, Tuesday, September 21, 1939, 6:30 am through midnight. Few other stations did all-day air checks back then; it all had to be done on disc, and It wasn’t cheap.

By a useful coincidence, that was also a day that President Roosevelt requested a special session of Congress, only the third one of his presidency, to consider the question of revising—that is, of effectively neutering--the Neutrality Act, passed two years earlier. This speech is available online, bracketed by news and commentary. We’ll get to it in more detail.

What was the context? In an age when revulsion against the carnage of WWI led to a postwar effort to outlaw all wars forever, the utopian ideas of the influencers of their day were propagated through every level of society. They were, mostly, sincere ones, misguided or not, and the main argument went like this: if the last big European war turned out to be just a big rah-rah-rah frameup by the arms manufacturers, why should America get involved again? Let the dictators fight it out.

That was the attitude of most of mainstream America as war began in Europe, September 1, 1939. Until then, as no less an observer than Mahatma Gandhi noted, Germany’s conquests were largely bloodless, won at the conference table, not on the battlefield. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that enabled the war was one of those sweeping geopolitical deals, but its results were far from bloodless this time.

For the first few weeks. Poland won the world’s admiration for gallantry. It was nonetheless inexorably carved up between the armies of Germany and the USSR. As of September 21, there wasn’t really a second world war yet, just a nasty western European conflict that threatened to become one. For roughly the next half a year, the period nicknamed the “Sitzkrieg”, or phony war, seemed to offer a last chance for a deal before tens of millions of people would die.

Most Irish-Americans, a large, important constituency of the Democratic Party, didn’t know or care a great deal about continental Europe. Roosevelt’s political problem was, many Irish Catholics were reflexively anti-British no matter who they were up against. To other Irish-Americans, on the Left, the UK was the ancestral face of global imperialism.

German-Americans were counted in the millions, especially in our biggest industrial states. They were not pro-Third Reich, but as FDR looked ahead to re-election in 1940, he knew they were eager to avoid repeating the suspicion and hostility they’d gone through in WWI.

Roosevelt’s speech to Congress was worded shrewdly and carefully. Unlike his later, more famous wartime addresses, in 1939 FDR went relatively light on praise of gallant Britain, and was by later standards vigorous but restrained in its description of Nazi-led Germany. He craftily homed in on American domestic interests instead. He had to win over a tough audience, to sell what was then a very unpopular policy of loosening restrictions on wartime help for Britain and preparing, if necessary, to enter the war ourselves.

He kept up that line of reasoning in speech after speech. After all, said the nation’s acknowledged master of radio storytelling, what would profit Americans more? Exporting mere raw materials to other countries, who would reap the benefits of employing their workers to turn them into finished products, thereby enjoying the benefits of supporting their industries? Or by making the products ourselves, bringing well-paid work to millions of Americans in industrial centers like Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo, keeping the jobs and the profits at home?

Put that way, it was meant to sound like a no-brainer: high-priced, high value added goods like, say, fighter plane engines should be made right here in the USA for export. From the standpoint of military preparedness, he had a solid point, but let’s be honest: shipping explicit war goods overseas violated any previous definition of neutrality, which is why the pesky Neutrality Act was in the way.

FDR’s sop to the neutrals was Cash and Carry, shorthand for a policy of requiring foreign buyers to pay on delivery and transport the goods home on their own ships. If shipping was sunk, well, it wouldn’t be our boats or our problem. It sounded evenhanded. In reality, it shaded things England’s way: Germany was a land power whose merchant fleet was dwarfed by Britain’s. And as for the “cash” part, the US and UK financial sectors were intertwined enough to blur that distinction in practice.

President Roosevelt got his way, and as 1939 ended, American industry began gearing up for rearmament. Like a knight in rusted armor, groaning to put forth his strength, it would take time. As Europe’s “sitzkrieg” ended in the spring and the Nazis resumed their march across Europe, America debated the start of our first-ever peacetime draft. By 1940, the Left suddenly turned anti-war, objectively as friendly to German interests as Charles Lindbergh had been, a stance they’d resolutely hold until June 22 the following year.

1940 is remembered in Britain as its darkest hour and its finest hour. For Europe it was a year of relentless, seemingly unstoppable advances by the Germans. For the Soviets it was a time of superficial camaraderie and cultural exchanges, masking the fact that they were frantically buying time to try to match Germany’s armaments build-up.

For the US, 1940 was an uneasy time of suspense. Contrary to the stereotypes of the Left, GM and the other carmakers, far from drooling at the thought of wartime profits, were alarmed that major war would disrupt markets still recovering from the Depression. James D. Mooney, head of General Motors Overseas Operations, was one of the busiest, most influential industrialists in the world.

Mooney became a back-door channel between the German government and the White House. Given a signed FDR letter and a vague, “the secretary will deny all knowledge” mandate by Roosevelt, he met with Hitler on March 4, 1940 to offer to mediate a ceasefire between the Germans and the British government, which was still headed by Neville Chamberlain. Mooney walked away from his meeting with Hitler convinced that peace was possible if America stepped in between the warring parties. The Germans simply saw a chance to use American pressure on London, which is also the way the (irritated) US State Department and the (angry) British Foreign Office viewed the Mooney initiative.

I have refrained from making too many comparisons between 1939-40 and the present situation, because some are useful, some would be misleading, and some comparisons are just facile, but it’s hard to read about Mooney of General Motors in 1940 and not see a mirror’s reflection of Musk of Tesla Motors in 2022. Meddlesome amateur who was in over his head? Or unlikely statesman, if they’d only listened to him? Let history judge.

By May, shock at the speed of Nazi conquest changed a lot of minds about neutrality. Roosevelt still piously insisted that US entry into the European war was not inevitable, and indeed that he “would not send your boys to war”, even as draft registration began.

Five Days in Philadelphia, by easygoing old Democrat journalist Charles Peters, is about the 1940 Republican National Convention. The first one with (very primitive) television coverage, you could watch it at the New York World’s Fair and in TV-equipped bars across New York and New Jersey. This was the famous “We Want Willkie!” convention, nominating a non-politician, one of the most unorthodox of -Republicans.

Yet, as unusual as Willkie was, we can recognize later GOP personalities in him. To Charlie Peters, the one stance that made Wendell Willkie something of a forgotten hero was his refusal to use Roosevelt’s war policies against him. For much of the national press, his backing of FDR’s internationalist instincts seemed to mark Willkie as the one Republican who was gutsy and noble, the one who gallantly referred to his political opponent in the White House as “The Champ”.

At the beginning of 1940, “everyone knew” that we were going to sit this one out, until at some mysterious flip-over point right after the elections, “everyone knew” that we were going to be drawn into it, one way or another. The Panama Canal, west coast ports and airplane factories, intercoastal shipping, the north Atlantic; there were just so many places where war could break out. Yet it was a total surprise, right?

Right? No, not quite. Certainly not to everyone in the know. Only three weeks in to the still limited European conflict that would become the history-changing cataclysm that forged our world, the graveyard of more than 30 million people, a few people sadly knew, at least in general, where events seemed to be headed. One of them—the President of the United States—said this, two years before Pearl Harbor:

“I give to you my deep and unalterable conviction, based on years of experience as a worker in the field of international peace, that by the repeal of the embargo the United States will more probably remain at peace than if the law remains as it stands today. To those who say that this program would involve a step toward war on our part, I reply that it offers far greater safeguards than we now possess or have ever possessed to protect American lives and property from danger. It is a positive program for giving safety. This means less likelihood of incidents and controversies which tend to draw us into conflict, as they did in the last World War. There lies the road to peace!”

The Paleocons have a point: This is—let’s not mince words—the kind of language a speechwriter would craft for Emperor Palpatine. It’s a call to authority, a call to trust, summed up with a ringing affirmation. That doesn’t necessarily make it wrong.

On September 21, 1939, FDR is not being candid. He knows some things we listeners don’t. Let history judge. It’s 84 years later. You and I are part of their future, by now able to reason, compare, and judge.